Tag Archives: Observer State

If You’re Not Getting Enough Pleasure out of Your Life, You’ve Got to Fix That

Volume 3, Issue 12

No one else is going to do it for you.

All that exists is the Now, so you can’t be putting off fun to some hoped-for future. If you’re not getting it right now, this very day, you’re not playing to win at the game of life; you’re trapping yourself in illusion and accepting second best.

What’s stopping you from seizing the day and living your dreams, right this very moment? Very likely it’s the deep dark repressed (or expressed) belief that you don’t have the power to change your life into the ideal vision you had for it. Especially now, when so much time has passed, and you’ve got negative momentum leading away from the goal, and everybody sees you one way so how could it ever be even imaginable that the consensus reality could ever change that dramatically?

It’s a deep and true intuition we feel in our gut that when so many minds are tuned to one way, getting all those minds to change very much is literally unthinkable. Yet it is truly miraculous how much those minds can change once you’ve changed your own.

The Ouroboros, the Greek symbol that Carl Jung said was the first symbol used by humanity, is a snake holding its own tail in its mouth, forming a circle. It has many meanings, some “good”, some “bad” — really all of them good but most of them bring you at first through stuff that appears bad. The “bad” interpretation is the fact that when we have a mental block, like believing we cannot live our dream, the belief comes true only because of the belief itself.

The intellect alone cannot get itself out of such traps by understanding them. The whole self working together has to turn the great ship in the water because its momentum is so strong that without unity among all parts of oneself the belief will unfortunately be borne out.

You get to unity inside through the Observer state, in which you meditate on your own Self, observing its machinations in minute detail perhaps for the first time with such sustained energy. This causes a breakthrough in which the Observer state becomes second nature and you find yourself popping in and out of the even higher Flow state — higher in the sense of higher performance, greater effectiveness.

In these higher states you can unravel the Ouroboros and make sure the energy is flowing in the right direction, where its meaning is the consuming of minutiae thoughts and low feelings as they arise, like a rising phoenix burning the dross to reveal the gold of your inner genius.

Best to all,

Bill

PS I am doing a book signing and talk on Thursday, May 16 from 5 to 7 PM at Forest Books, 182 Birch Hill Rd., Locust Valley, New York 11560 in Long Island. Please join me if you are in the area.

Bring a Sense of the Epic into Your Life

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Volume 3, Issue 11

Science can no longer rule out the possibility that a Single Universal Intelligence is the only thing that exists, per our Theory of the Conscious Universe. Our theory explains how this Intelligence is able to simultaneously play an infinite number of chess games called lives. The You who looks out your eyes and experiences life may not be the gnomish “you” that parts of yourself — neuron clusters programmed by Accidentalism and Materialism — think you are.

Accidentalism is the religion that claims the universe came about by accident out of nothingness.

Materialism is the religion that claims everything is matter, so the human need to worship something can be directed only at material things.

My theory is not a religion. It is a system of hypotheses aimed at explaining all of documented human experience including the “paranormal”. We classify certain experiences as “paranormal” based on our limited experience in the universe as the standard for what is “normal”. And based on our mental emotional ego filters that protect us from dissonance by steadfastly refusing to make anything out of the cumulatively uncanny success rate of our own hunches, thereby trivializing our own experiences of the “paranormal”.

The explanation making the most sense to my gut is that there is only One of us. Each of us is another instance of the Universal Intelligence. All instances are really one Intelligence playing many roles.

The main thing about my theory is that I don’t want you to believe it but rather to test it for yourself. This means using it as a lens of what may in fact be true, certainly is possible, and why not see if using the lens to explain experience might not lead to more control and pleasure than the present way of looking at things?

Some might liken this to a pleasant drug-induced state of useless fantasy. It is equally plausible that the way we as a world look at things today is an unpleasant drug-induced state of useless fantasy.

At any rate, one needs merely to entertain the possibility that the entire selfness of the Universe is what looks out your eyes, which you call yourself “me”. This is logically and empirically possible based on the most predictively successful theory in history, quantum mechanics. So entertain it for a second.

Realize it is possible that you are the one self that exists, enjoying yet another life. Realize if this just happens to be the one true explanation that science and everyone will affirm some day in the future, here you are going to the movies to enjoy identifying with a fictional character who is having an epic adventure, when in fact that is just a fairy tale produced in Hollywood while your own life is a genuine, authentic, rich real life saga of a hero beset by challenges and overcoming them — just like in the movies — but real — and therefore infinitely more meaningful and dramatic.

It is possible that the One Being is you… and everyone else. Possible. Actually possible. You have been betting on a reality so far different from this, your automatic reaction is to thrust it aside with a derisive snort. That reflex is itself an interesting phenomenon deserving careful attention — put a pin in it, we will come back and dissect it often on this page in the future. Call it your daily persona, “the robot”. The name is a handle to put on that aspect of your self — the reasons will become apparent in this blog and in my books (including Mind Magic) and DVDs.

Don’t let the thrusting aside of new concepts or experiences be internally accepted. Override it by an act of will from your true self. Keep an open mind. Empirical evidence is the only thing to give weight to. Things you yourself have experienced, seen with your own eyes, not things you were told. All the philosophies and cosmologies and religions and scientific theories and my theories are just abstractions of the real thing — symbol systems, metaphors, isomorphisms (same information carried in different code). Reality is what it is. As a race we cannot say yet that we really know what it is. Therefore an open mind is the only sane position — yet another clue that the present world system is not actually sane. Acceleritis has caused EOP. Information overload has actually existed for 6000 years and just keeps getting worse, exponentially. We are dealing with it very poorly. Our society is not yet a sophisticated one. Civilization on planet Earth will be sane and sophisticated when its mind is open and each person is making careful and unfiltered observations of his/her own experience. The Observer state leading to the Flow state.

Takeaway: don’t thrust aside the undisprovable possibility that you are the hero in the most epic movie of all time… and so is everyone else.

Best to all,

Bill

PS — You Are The Universe is now on track for Summer 2013 publication. Watch this space for more.

Flow Genes

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Volume 3, Issue 9

Thanks to Steven Kotler and the Flow Research Collective for their metaphor of the Human Genome Project as the kind of thing we need even more to facilitate Flow state. Now that thousands and maybe millions of us are experimenting and getting into this state, it has to become a world priority like the environment and the economy. In fact it can solve those and any other challenges we face, whereas the reverse is not true. If we start with the symptoms we will never reach the cure. Flow is where it all starts. Flow means better decision making and more creativity. If that is not exactly what we need, what is?

Love you say? Glad you added that. Love is actually the best pathway for the average person to reach Flow most quickly. Loving communication is the way for the masses to realize Flow state in our lifetimes — maybe the only way.

It starts with people we already love. We find Flow ways to communicate with them. They notice and appreciate the difference. We notice the stuck keys inside us that we get past to allow us to talk lovingly about another’s stuck keys in a way that feels good to everyone.

Getting back to the metaphor of genes, what could Steven and his colleagues mean? If I take it to mean that brain states and methods are the two ways of looking at the components within Flow, this metaphor has objective and subjective levels:

Understanding what goes on in the brain in getting to and through Flow and the post-period and recycle — this is the scientific objective level that corresponds most exactly to the Human Genome Project, which decoded what information each gene carries;
Understanding the methods we can each use to take advantage of this prior scientific understanding, where each method is a gene — this is the subjective interior method each individual takes by acts of will or automatically in order to experience Flow and maximize it. The subjective is operationally more important to us than the objective level, because it is only through willful inner experience shaping that we exercise any power to bring on one state or another.

The Human Effectiveness Institute has discovered numerous genes/methods for bringing on Flow more often. The Aha! Cultivation process is one of them that the Institute shares with Steven Kotler and his colleagues, who revealed only that one method at the ARF conference; we assume there are more methods/genes in the Flow Genome Project so far, and more to be discovered by cross-fertilization with other researchers like ourselves. Aha! is only one way in which Flow can be experienced — other methods get you there too. The book Mind Magic is a compendium of Flow genes/methods, not exhaustive of the entire long list. The book is focused on stimulating Flow state through the Observer state by the use of “inner head” language, which some see as poetry, to evoke moods that evidently change brain chemistry and shift energy patterns within different brain parts.

Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi who coined Flow, lists quite a few genes/methods such as the balance between skills and challenges, the autotelic enjoyment-driven way the individual comes to the game or métier, and a number of other great insights available in his books.

Daniel Goleman has also contributed genes/methods to the list. His dictum that a person needs about 10,000 hours of practice in something in order to become a candidate for Flow in that endeavor is illuminating. This is a gene that can guide us to selection of activities in which to attempt and monitor our success. Anything that guides the individual to use specific methods that actually work to get to Flow is a gene in the way I take, or perhaps take liberties with, the seminal metaphor Steven and the Flow Genome Project have cooked up.

The work of many people led to the discovery of the gene of previsualization, which is widely recognized to increase Flow.

The genes that our work has contributed include, to mention a few top of mind:

Getting to the Flow state by getting to the Observer state first
Thinking without words
Burning out attachments
Vigilant action to vitiate the power of distraction
Unconditional Omnidirectional Love
Fun
Can-do attitude

I hope that someday when all the genes have been listed someone will organize them into something that looks like a space age version of Mendeleyev’s (periodic) table of the elements so we can see the relationships among the genes/methods/brain states and thereby have a better understanding of how each method works to change the brain state.

Best to all,

Bill

Flow Goes Mainstream

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Volume 3, Issue 6

March 18-20, 2013 — the Advertising Research Foundation Re:THINK 2013 program sports a lunchtime speaker, Steven Kotler, two days in a row on the subject of Flow state (the Zone) and how to instill it in business. Bravo! (See Review next issue.)

I’d like to think that my blogs on Flow, and the (somewhat) Flow-inducing ARF University Masters Level Playshop with Richard Zackon, helped create a conducive atmosphere for ARF to put Flow state high on their new program. Hopefully it will stay there over time as Flow state means better decisions, more creativity, more effectiveness, and significantly, it means authenticity, not the Mask of the Advertiser, as Nick Pisacane calls it. Advertising itself as well as its research will benefit more from Flow state than by any technology.

Authenticity is the key attribute most necessary in the new social era of media advertising and persuasive communications. In Flow state, one has no egoistic tugs on the essence of the idea emanating. One is not self-protective (except in martial arts settings). Authentic feelings are expressed and this is what the public thirsts for — both to receive authentic messaging and to evoke it from inside by immersion in a world of role models acting genuinely. This is the promise of the future society powered by Flow state.

President Obama is initiating a federal research program into the brain and consciousness. Flow state for the military and government is one motivating driver. I began to pepper US presidents with this idea 40 years ago and have run workshops for top US military officers to teach the inner “tricks” of Flow.

Our work at the Human Effectiveness Institute is focused on the experiential handles. What goes on within the subjective frame that can be guided? Richard Davidson and Daniel Goleman, my old friends and partners, lead the world in both understanding the psychology of consciousness at the brain level, and in disseminating the information so that everyone can benefit. I see our workstreams as complementary. Theirs is objective and mine subjective, the way consciousness is experienced from the inside and what controls we have over it, which are largely subtle.

Dan in his great book The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights (reviewed here recently) uses the term “Self-Management” to describe one of the pillars of Emotional Intelligence, a quotient conducive to Flow. We would probably use the word “guidance” in place of “management” in that managing is not as encompassing as guiding. Freud in Civilization and its Discontents calls the ego or secondary principle the “manager”, arising from the id or primary principle, which is who we are at first. In Freud’s view both the id and ego persist together as aspects of the self, joined by the impounded incoming other-directedness of the superego or conscience.

Zen is the art and science of making the ego and superego transparent (though still present) so the self is expressing the id in a way that is in Flow with the Tao or universal consciousness. Zen’s contempt for words and concepts neuter the ego, which depends on the intellect, concepts and words for its management style. In Mind Magic, the section on Mindquiet provides a simplified step-by-step approach to removing the over-emphasis on words.

In his Maximize your “Aha!” Moment blog post recently (see also my post Set Yourself up to Cultivate “Aha!” Moments from Sept 27, 2012) Dan points out that there is a burst of gamma activity (signaling “far-flung brain cells connecting in a new neural network”) in the neocortical right temporal lobe 300 milliseconds before an “Aha!” moment. He also describes that part of the brain as being the part that gets jokes: “It understands the language of the unconscious… the language of poems, of art, of myth. It’s the logic of dreams where anything goes and the impossible is possible.”

That’s a good description of the inner-mind language used throughout Mind Magic, which is designed to be a stimulus to bring the reader into the Observer state as an ideal Launchpad for Flow. We hypothesize that the subjective self is more centered in the right temporal lobe than the left during Observer state, as sensed by the natural ease with which one thinks wordlessly — whereas the left temporal is the “Worder” as I call it. Both right and left temporal areas have active insight collection capabilities, the left seeing differences analytically through abstraction and symbols (e.g. words), and the right seeing connections holistically in feeling/images.

Main takeaway: we need tools we can use to get into Flow and these must speak in layperson terms. Dissecting the physical brain processes underlying Flow is needed too, but in itself does not replace tools that the layperson can apply to get into Flow — which is the purpose of our work. More on Flow Goes Mainstream in the next post.

Best to all,

Bill